I have a vacation home in the sticks and the government subsidized running fiber to the area and now my cabin in the sticks has better internet than I do in Fort Worth
A lot of the fuck up and wasted money in the government comes from the government agencies being forced to hire private contractors to do the work because congress always makes sure that their donors are taken care of.
Building an interstate highway system is not the same as building a house. The government can do things that private industry simply can’t. And we all benefit from those projects. Highways let us live farther from work and make housing more affordable. They provide efficient means of shipping that reduce the cost of the goods we buy. Same goes for getting clean water to your house and dirty water away from it. The same also goes for providing healthcare. But we’re stupidly fighting that fight and failing and causing more and more people to go bankrupt as a result. The government is good because of its size and ability to fund projects no individual or business could. You wouldn’t ask the government to build a single home for you, but there a lot of things that the government should keep doing because nobody else can.
And I’m sure someone will say they are neocon centrists, which they might be, I have no idea. But at least they aren’t auditioning on Fox News
Interesting that he created a cabinet level position for Climate Envoy (Kerry) and put him on the national security council as well.
The one very good thing about Yellen is that she’s not an inflation reactionary. When she was Fed chair, she consistently beat back the “professional economist” push to raise interest rates - and she was completely right. She’s not an MMTer obviously but if her instinct to place getting to full employment ahead of the specter of inflationary pressure holds then she’ll probably do some good. She’s also someone whose nomination the GOP will have little success fighting.
This isn’t a thing we should ever worry about. If they have the majority and think it’s their interest, they’ll block everyone. Mitch don’t give a shit. Power is its own end with that douche. Also, it’s gotten to the point where I don’t think I want anyone in this administration that Mitch doesn’t want to torpedo.
Even with a 52-48 edge Mitch is going to have trouble blocking any reasonable candidate with his four moderate repubs
yellen was basically progressive approved, has said all the right things about learning from the last decade, and has a history of not being a rigid ideologue on deficits/austerity/etc progressives wanted to kill brainards candidacy and did, the compromise candidate was yellen
I can’t believe this thread wasn’t even on page 2 before we got some Republicans mismanage government so we should elect people who will reduce government Galaxy brain takes
Becerra wouldn’t accept the HHS job if he thought he was gonna get the Senate seat. So either Biden knows who Newsom is gonna pick or knows that he wasn’t gonna pick Becerra.
More in the sense that I don’t get why Becerra is the pick for HHS. As far as I can tell, no public health experience, touched on HHS tangentially only as an appropriator while in Congress, and, other than having reliably Democratic positions, doesn’t seem to have done much of relevance since then?
Him not having a medical background and also staunchly supporting m4a make it a bit of a surprising choice.
The thought process is probably: administrative abilities and positives outweigh experience, put him in charge and give him a competent advisor and he’ll do a better job than the available experienced candidates
Biden made his comments unprompted, referencing an earlier remark made by NAACP President Derrick Johnson, who had warned that appointing Tom Vilsack to be secretary of agriculture would anger Black farmers in Georgia, as well as Black voters generally in the state, for whom Shirley Sherrod was a hero. Sherrod was fired by Vilsack from her position as Georgia Director of Rural Development for the USDA during Vilsack’s previous tenure as agriculture secretary during the Obama administration. Her firing was quickly revealed to have been a mistake, and based on an incomplete airing of a video by the late conservative provocateur Andrew Breitbart. Particularly in Georgia, Johnson noted, Vilsack’s capitulation was still a sore spot and nominating him would be “disastrous” electorally. “If you consider the victory that you appreciated in Georgia, it was around 12,000 votes. And so as you consider appointments, you also must consider what impact would that have on voters in the state of Georgia. And I will submit to you that former Secretary Vilsack could have a disastrous impact on voters in Georgia. Shirley Sherrod is a civil rights legend, a hero,” Johnson said ... Toward the end of the conversation, Biden raised Johnson’s remark to dismiss it, saying Johnson would soon learn more about Vilsack’s record. It also wouldn’t be prudent to have that fight before the Georgia runoffs, he said, before adding that police reform should also be avoided. “I also don’t think we should get too far ahead ourselves on dealing with police reform in that, because they’ve already labeled us as being ‘defund the police,’ anything we put forward in terms of the organizational structure to change policing — which I promise you, will occur. Promise you,” Biden said. “That’s how they beat the living hell out of us across the country, saying that we’re talking about defunding the police. We’re not. We’re talking about holding them accountable. We’re talking about giving them money to do the right things. We’re talking about putting more psychologists and psychiatrists on the telephones when the 911 calls through. We’re talking about spending money to enable them to do their jobs better, not with more force, with less force and more understanding.”